Regular readers know that English is not my mother language , but are kind enough to forgive me for my many mistakes.

I am always willing to learn. Today, while researching for an upcoming post, I came across an expression  I never heard before: “spiffy charts”. I felt in love with “spiffy charts” the moment I read it. And I read it straight from the horse’s mouth (I mean Microsoft).

If you don’t know how to make a chart and are keen to preserve that blissful ignorance, I highly recommend Microsoft Office Online Training, specially the module Create a professional looking chart (regular readers also know how I love “professional-looking charts“). You’ll learn how to “customize your charts to make them more attractive, memorable, and effective“. This means useless charts.

So, let’s see how to turn a humdrum (this is a new word, too…) chart into a spiffy one. First, to declutter your chart remove grid lines:

As you know, grid lines are useless, specially if you don’t care about the data. I would remove the gray background and the border around the legend. And I’d give the chart a more descriptive title to tell the users what they are seeing, but that’s my personal taste.

Then you should remove the y-axis and add labels to each column, further “decluttering” the chart. At this point the readers start sighing for a nicely designed chart table.

Want to give your chart a little more “flair” and make them more “professional-looking”? Just add a gradient fill and a subtle shadow:

Now comes the spiffy part. Imagine that you have a 3D column chart with two series, and one obscures the other. What do you do? No, you can’t remove the stupid 3D effect (remember: you want to make t spiffy chart, not a humdrum one). Well, all you have to do is to change the order of the series:

Much better now, don’t you think? They accept that 3D charts “can be more attractive, but sometimes more difficult to read accurately” (surprise, surprise!). Apparently that’s a detail in the grand scheme of things. You are excused from making accurate charts if you are making professional-looking ones.

So, what else can you do to improve your chart? Ah, yes: the y-axis in a humdrum column chart always starts at zero. We don’t want that, do we?

Now you know how to make inaccurate, professional-looking, spiffy-with-a-flair marmalade charts. Please go straight to the kitchen, make some real marmalade and forget all you’ve learned about data visualization in the Microsoft Office Online Training.

(This is not a real Microsoft Office Training site, is it? It must be some kind of spoof site, and I fell for that trick. Right? Right?)

Sigh…

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Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Spiffy Charts

Human creativity is virtually limitless. But:

• You don’t vary color by data point.
• You don’t force the eyes to a pendular movement if you can avoid it.
• You don’t use a legend when you can use axis labels.
• You can’t have a residual category that large.

Bloggers don’t seem to learn, even with a good teacher.

(Bar chart published in the ReadWriteWeb)

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Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Just Another Stupid Bar Chart

Nathan discusses this chart. He says:

I know a lot of you don’t like bubbles in your viz, but this one works for me.

Jon Peltier, in the comments, argues that:

Sets of bars would have been more effective.

Tim adds the definitive argument:

“Always using bar charts is like always using missionary position. It might be more practical, but it gets boring!”

OK, let’s see. I have nothing against bubbles, there is a good level of interaction, and the chart looks clean and professional.

And yet, something is missing. I like interactive charts, but I’m lazy. I love a chart that shares a story with me and invites me to touch and manipulate and find more and more. When you open this chart there is nothing interesting to see, and if you force it to speak, well, it just… bubbles.

Tim’s comment is fun, but not very accurate. I will not detail my own preferences regarding positions but, unlike data visualization, getting the job done quickly by maximizing efficiency is not exactly my number one priority.

You can/should be creative, but at some point you must decide if you want to know how far down the rabbit hole goes. If not, it’s just inconsequential foreplay. Nice, but not enough.

I have to agree with missionary Jon on this one…

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Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Inconsequential Foreplay

Why do people insist on using “professional looking charts” in their presentations? If I wanted to divert the audience’s attention from the data, I would get a professional clown suit, instead. I would look professional. Not exactly the professional-looking presenter people expect in a corporate environment, but nevertheless a professional.

Meet professional-looking Mr. and Mrs. Gulliver and their Lilliputian friends (courtesy from SmartDraw):

(This may be a pet peeve of mine, but whenever I hear the expression “professional-looking charts” I reach for my Browning.)

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Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Get a Clown Suit, Instead

You can add  silly 3D effects to a pie chart, you can explode all the slices, you can compare multiple pie charts, you can use a legend instead of labeling the slices directly. This will probably render your graph useless, and make you look kind of dumb, but it is not the end of the world-as-we-know-it. But when making a pie chart there is something that you should never ever do, a capital sin that will make you burn in the hell of information visualization: using more than one variable in a single graph.

Well, since we are witnessing the end of the world-as-we-know-it, computer scientists at the University of Utah decided to give a little push, visualization-wise. They are designing a computer application “they hope eventually will allow news reporters and citizens to easily, interactively and visually [analyze] election results, political opinion polls or other surveys”. They boldly state that they “have developed new techniques for exposing complex relationships that are not obvious by usual methods of statistical analysis” (press release). And what are those new techniques? A doughnut chart:

The outer ring labels the series and the inner ring displays the data. Apparently you may add as many series as you wish and you can filter the results by socio-demographic characteristics. There is a video demonstration here [via].

This is the kind of joke that I would expect to be related to April Fool’s Day, but they seem to be serious about it. No one told them that showing part-of-a-whole is one of the few strenghts of circular charts, that when people see 52,7% they see a pie cut in half, not a quarter, that “whole” mean 100%, not 200% or 300%.

Regular readers know that I rarely utter such harsh comments on visualization ideas and applications (I even tried to create a dashboard using Crystal Xcelsius), but this is the stupidest idea of the year. They should know better (here are some tips).

By the way, I found this through a post by Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb. She writes: “unfortunately, the poll-analysis software isn’t quite ready for prime time. What a tease!” Fortunately, it is not! And judging from other posts, they could use an information visualization consultant. 

Well, perhaps I’m missing something. Am I?

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Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

How Many Computer Scientists Does It Take to Screw Up a Pie Chart?

I really dislike stacked bar charts… Let’s see a new bad example.

Steve Rubel shares with us how he spent his time online over the last two weeks. He uses the Firefox add-on PageAddict to monitor the time. He writes:

As you can see almost all of my time online is work related. Still I can see that I need to shrink my social network usage a little bit and increase my time with documents, web applications while also keeping RSS contained. I also need to go through the undefined section to see if there are big groups of sites that can be tagged.

I would say that it is hard to see what Steve Rubel wants us to see. It is not his fault, of course, he is just pasting a chart from the application. I do see something interesting: since he spends “the vast majority of [his] computing time” using Firefox (let’s say 80%) he’s using his computer around 4.5 hours a day only. That’s nice…

If I wanted to visually track my time online (I should…) these are some of the options I’d like to have:

• Color-code work/non-work related categories;
• Label the x axis with dates, not “days ago”;
• Remove non-working days;
• Use small-multiples to track each category;
• Use weeks instead of days;
• Annotate outliers;
• Show planned vs. actual time spending;
• Minimize the “undefined” category;

I’m installing the add-on. Hope I can have an interesting dataset to share by the end of October.

Do you use these tools? Do you like their reporting functionalities?

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Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Spending Time Deciphering Time Utilization Charts

I follow some of the top blogs-about-blogging and they often come up with advices that I can relate to when thinking of information visualization: simplicity, consistency, go to the point, remove clutter, tell a story…

Problem is, bloggers about blogging fail to follow their own advice when they attempt to graphically display the results of their online surveys or other quantitative data. This is something that I’ve been planning to write about because it is recurrent, but last week both Darren Rose and Chris Garret decided to offer me very good examples…

Anatomy of a bad chart

I’m afraid to say that in Darren’s chart almost everything is wrong:

• No scale: A chart is about trends and patterns, but you must give the reader at least some quantitative reference;
• Unnecessary multiple colors: If you are displaying a single series, it doesn’t make sense to vary colors by point;
• No sort: sorting the data establishes a pattern and helps the reader to immediately see the relative importance of each item;
• Unmanageable legend: since there are more data points than you can store in your working memory, the chart forces a pendular movement from the legend to the chart and back;

Pies, Arab countries and eight decimal places

Chris likes pies. 2D, 3D, it really doesn’t matter. But sometimes he gets tired of them and uses a bar chart. For very similar data and similar messages, you should use very similar charts, right? It’s called consistency (tip number 8 for a successful blog). But you don’t find consistency in these charts.

From the pie chart “Blogger Ages” and the column chart “Year Started Blogging” I infer that Chris lives in or wants to target some Arab country, since they read from right to left.

Chris infers from the survey results that “most bloggers live in the USA”. I would say that “most bloggers that [read English blogs and happen to read Chris'] live in the USA”.

And at the end you’ll find that table with eight decimal places.

Blogging, information visualization and information management

This is not about Darren or Chris or some irrelevant charts. They are great bloggers, better than I aspire to be. But why do they fail to meet their own standards when dealing with quantitative data?

Of course they would replay to me “you fail to meet your own standards when blogging”. Yes, I do. We all know the basic laws. We know they apply across several knowledge fields, but many of us only recognize them and make use of them inside our little silos.

But I would really like to see at least some decent charts and good information assessment in these top blogs. We desperately need higher numeric and graphic literacy to handle all this amount of data, and they could help to set better standards.

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Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Why can't bloggers-about-blogging do basic charts?

How do you sell your outrageously expensive consulting services? Simple, just add a chart…

Not every chart will do, of course. Let me outline some basic design rules of what I call a “consulting chart”:

• It shouldn’t be recognizable as a standard chart that you could create in Excel;
• It shouldn’t use popular eye-catching design elements, like 3D or textures (hire a designer if you really want those);
• It should convey an impression of complexity but make everyone feel smart because they could actually understand it;

Conventional visualization rules do not apply to this kind of charts. It lays between a proper chart and an icon or a logo. Always remember that your report may be 300 hundred pages thick, but only this chart will be shared in internal presentations, and the managers (your clients) should be proud of presenting it (money well spent).

If you don’t feel creative today, just use the chart above. Every consultant likes it. A circular chart or a radar variant is always a good bet. Each color represents a dimension, and there is a set of five indicators for each dimension. A seven-point scale is used to measure each indicator.

As an example, a dimension could be “Human Resources”, and “turnover” one of the indicators. Display two of these charts side by side to compare “We” vs. “Them” or “Today” vs “Tomorrow”.

Here is a dilemma…

Strictly speaking, a simple bar chart would do a much more efficient job at displaying the data and letting the users compare multiple series.

But let’s be completely honest here. You know your client, and you know he will happily spend 12,000 for a report with these charts. If you use a regular bar chart you can’t ask for more than 10,000. What would you do? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

The consultant's chart: a dilemma

Dear Mr. Hervé Carré

I’ve been browsing through some of the Eurostat publications and I thought you would appreciate some constructive feedback, since it is your job to ensure that governments, businesses, media and the general public do have access in a timely manner to reliable and objective data. I’m starting with some general findings, then I’ll show and comment several examples and finally I’ll propose generic guidelines for data display.

First of all, a general strategy regarding how the data should be displayed seems to be lacking. I tried (without success) to find some kind of “style guide”. Of course there is the Interinstitutional style guide, where one can find gems such as:

Line drawings (graphs, diagrams, etc.), on the other hand, can be made more simply (without screens). Poorer-quality paper can be used (calendered or glazed) on which even simple drawings in Indian ink can be reproduced.

Indian ink?

The problem is, without a general strategy, format and content becomes heavily dependent on some random criteria, like the designer’s taste, skills and (numeric and graphic) literacy. What happens then? For similar data, there are very different approaches, depending on the publication or even from chapter to chapter. Also, what is overview, what is detail, how and when should they be used, are not always clear.

There are explicit guidelines to reduce printing costs by minimizing the number of colors. The publication design should accommodate that, but it doesn’t, and many charts become unreadable. If the designers don’t know how to work within these constraints, hire someone else.

Speaking of charts… Charts are not there just because. With a good chart, trends and patterns in the data are easily spotted and that really helps the reader to understand the data. That’s what they are used for. They are not there to poorly illustrate some numbers. I believe that a chart tells us a lot about its designer’s information management skills. The chart is just the tip of the iceberg.

Let me show you several examples of badly designed charts. From The social situation in the European Union 2005-2006:

A chart is not a table. Only some “special” columns should be labeled (outliers, totals…). In this chart the column labels look like the march of the ants. If they are really needed, there are other options that should be considered (also, why does the scale in the Y axis starts at -2 when the minimum value is 0,7?).

This chart is particularly unreadable. It supposedly compares the mean age of women at birth of first child in the new EU members with the minimum and maximum values in the EU-15. This maximum/minimum corridor is a good idea, but the Min “EU-15″ area should be white (to emphasize the corridor above). But no one can see meaningful trends in nine series.

Column charts shouldn’t be used with such lengthly labels, no one will read them. Perhaps they should be replaced by icons.

According to the general wisdom, pie charts shouldn’t be used; if they are used, five or six should be the maximum number of slices, and they should be ordered from maximum to minimum. How far from the general wisdom is this chart?

This is new to me: the chart not only has a legend for the series but also for the x axis.

From Consumers in Europe:

I am sorry, but this display of quintile groups (what?) is absurd. It doesn’t make sense, the markers completely overlap each other, the chart aspect ratio doesn’t help… This is absolutely useless.

Avoid breaking a table in two. If you have to many columns, try to switch columns and rows (it could be done in this case).

The march of the ants vs. the scattered army… Again, a chart is not a table. If you label everything, you don’t get the table and you lose the chart. Stacked bars should also be avoided.

I understand that, by using a single color, you minimize printing costs. But what’s the use of a chart if you can’t read it because you can’t see where a series is? The human eye can spot very subtle color differences, but connecting the dots (or the bars) is a very different story. The chart design should ensure that the reader can discriminate the series.

From Europe in figures – Eurostat yearbook 2006-07:

Is this relevant? Can’t we just say “EU population grew from 390 millions in 1960 to 460 in 2005″? What is the chart for? There is no change, there is no story, there is no chart.

The lines here have to struggle to be seen. Grid lines are at the center of the stage, when they should only have a supporting role. Also, which series is the secondary Y axis linked to? How can we know?

From Cultural Statistics:

Comparing pies is dangerous. For example, a reader could conclude from these charts that there is a positive balance for the EU in the trade with the US (the imports slice is much smaller than the export slice). But 21% of 925 million (imports) is 194 million and 34% of 484 million (exports) is 165 million. In fact the imports are larger than the exports. The casual reader will have a different perception.

Quantiles again. Funnier, but what does it say? Where are the trends? Where are the patterns? And why is it sorted by country code? Why not by the average total?

This is not cherry picking, I’m afraid. A large majority of the charts in these Eurostat publications suffer from flawed design that prevents them from fulfilling their role. There are other problems besides bad chart design, but they can only be seen at the page or multi-page level.

So, how can this be improved? For starters, you should sponsor a new Eurostat style guide to ensure that a general strategy for information display is available, known and applied. Here is a small and random sample of guidelines that could be included:

• For each chapter in a publication, create a report with small tables and charts. Put the detail tables at the the end of the chapter;
• Use country names or country codes (preferably), but not both;
• Too many series render a chart unreadable – use panel charts instead;
• A chart is about variation, not about specific values – remove anything that masks or hides it;
• Reduce chart size;

Please note that I’m not a graphic designer. I am not trying to convince you that the Eurostat publications should have prettier, handmade, colorful charts and tables. What I am trying sell is this idea that a good information design not only dramatically improves communication effectiveness but can also have a positive impact in other areas, like reduced printing costs (for example, the number of pages of the Yearbook could be cut down by 20% without sacrificing content).

Still not convinced? I’ll tell you what. Select a chapter of the Yearbook and I’ll redesign it for you. For free. Then we’ll meet to discuss the results.

Thanks for your time and hope this was helpful.

Best regards,

Jorge Camoes

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Post from: Excel Charts Blog.

Letter to the Director-General of Eurostat